C. S. Lewis

“For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers...”

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteri...”

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one h...”

“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator i...”

“The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and poli...”

“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator i...”

“A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.”

“In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish...”

“His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdne...”

“the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a medi...”

“the difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge...”

“The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus o...”

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

“Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.”

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that o...”

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”

“Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.”